This morning seminar session at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design concludes the OAT Academy 2022 workshop week. The academy is inviting Patricia Lucena Ventura (TU Graz), and Céline Zimmer & César Reyes Nájera (University of Luxembourg) to discuss Micro-political mobilization in Brazil from a feminist perspective, dialogues, participation and co-operation processes in urban planning, and the decommodification of housing.

Schedule:

9:30-10:00 / Coffee and pastries, introduction

10:00-10:40 / Talk 1: Céline Zimmer (architect & PhD candidate, University of Luxembourg)

10:40-11:20 / Talk 2: “Cultures of Assembly”, César Reyes Nájera (architect & PhD candidate, University of Luxembourg)

11:20-12:00 / Talk 3: “Donas Da Terra - Female Role Models of Social Leadership in Urban Micropolitical Processes“, Patricia Lucena Ventura (architect and researcher, TU Graz)

12:00 / Concluding comments

Talk 1: Within this talk we will get an inside in the problematic definition of housing as a commodity and in the mechanisms of the free real estate market. We will learn how a cooperative can be a tool to “hack” those mechanisms and how this model can contribute to the decommodification of housing. Using the Luxembourgish housing crisis as an example, we will clarify to what extent the anchoring of cooperatives in the housing market can help the alleviation of housing crises.

Talk 2: Cultures of Assembly.

In this talk we will share this long-term research initiative run by the Chair of the City of Esch at the University of Luxembourg. CoA is a project for discussing and speculating on spaces of agonism for democracies in the making. It runs in parallel with a new neighbourhood agency in the city centre of Esch-sur-Alzette. CoA aims to generate productive dialogues between conflictual urban pasts, presents, and futures, and the various publics and individuals who claim and produce them.

CoA are Markus Miessen, Marija Maric, César Reyes Nájera, Francelle Cane.

https://culturesofassembly.org/

Talk 3: Donas Da Terra - Female Role Models of Social Leadership in Urban Micropolitical Processes

On a trans-national scale, the global economy has transformed urban realities of the entire terrestrial geography in recent decades. On the local scale, however, an invisible, revolutionary phenomenon can be engendered, based on micropolitical mobilization. Between macro-political dispositif and micro-political disposition, self-organized cooperation suggests a third way, beyond market and state. Within the CONVERSATIONS format of the conference, a movie stream with following roundtable discussion between the architects, filmmakers, and the audience address issues of urban cooperative action, co-production and co-management of shared resources and capacities.

The short documentary DONAS DA TERRA (19 minutes) follows female role models for social leadership in urban micropolitical processes in Brazil. Thereby, the movie interrelates three areas of interest: First, the micropolitical self-organization with the goal to create a collective participatory voice in urban planning discourses and actively shape political objectives. Second, the dissociation from gender-specific roles in order to initiate different discourses beyond the formalistic frameworks of the formal top-down policy-making conception. Third, to discuss the feminist perspective on sustainable urbanism in order to make visible gender claims as urban parameters.